It is unpredictable market so no one is know the future possibilities of bitcoin. Because number of times many experts says it will reach 10k soon and 20k soon.
Dont speculate on what others are saying. Have your own strategy planned out and play accordingly. You dont have to follow what the heavy hitters are saying but be rational and apply logic to make profits. If you have some basic understanding of how the market works you would not be saying this. 10k wont happen anytime soon. It might be reached this year but the dumping is happening too much so it might dump before it actually reaches there.
It actually varies. When bitcoin was a lot cheaper, people also mined it. I think that bitcoin would always be mined no matter what
People mined it in a more amateurish way when the difficulty was lower and ASICs were not in market. At a time when people could use their CPU and GPUs to mine. Then the "super-specialization" of mining happened and ruined the market for the small term miners.
This is the main reason that I never believed in predictions. All the predictions about the price of bitcoin from the previous years became false and against the facts. I do my own research and analysis and decide the future price of bitcoin, but I never told anybody and I will never tell anybody about the future price of bitcoin, because I dont the people to be misguided.